


Deaths of Varying Size

by QueenLapinova



Category: Pacific Rim (2013)
Genre: Canonical Character Death, Character Death, M/M, Masturbation, Necrophilia, Slow Build, Vomiting
Language: English
Status: In-Progress
Published: 2013-10-04
Updated: 2013-10-20
Packaged: 2017-12-28 09:31:30
Rating: Explicit
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings, Graphic Depictions Of Violence
Chapters: 2
Words: 2,421
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/990448
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/QueenLapinova/pseuds/QueenLapinova
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>"He witnesses the fall of a rockstar."</p><p>Hermann Gottlieb, abuzz with stress both personal and Geiszler related, makes a grave mistake.</p>
            </blockquote>





	1. A Death of Insurmountable Size and Consequence

**Author's Note:**

> Perhaps this is a bit morbid for my first actual fic- but I hope you enjoy!
> 
> ( Rating stands for the coming chapters, as this one is not yet so... nasty. )

A breath through his nose flaring at the nostrils; Hermann ramrods his back and speaks, “ _Newton..._ ” The scientist’s  name is filtered through a mouth tight enough to squanch syllables into tersity and his eyes still have not acknowledged the doctor whose hand fists over his cane wringing sweat from his palms.

 _“NEWTON!”_   The cane hit the desk in a metallic dangerous clip for attention and papers take flight as if the stained wings of frightened birds. It was his manic drive for attention that had Newt’s neck snapping to his angle and, from far away, he heard the muffled throb of a warehouse rave, only growing in intensity as Hermann yanked a length of white cord from the startled man’s ears.

“Dude!” His hands flew into shock, into surrender;  a yellow no.2 pencil speared the air and, with a dull clatter, vaulted over his desk into dim freedom, “What?!” Reverberating recovery from the unsettling rap of Hermann’s cane having come in close contact with his hand, Newt shook his head as he spoke, his own motion dislodging in a plastic slither the hanging white cord from his shoulders.

“Dr. _Geiszler._ ” Stopped midflight by the scrambling palms of his hands, papers are jammed against the side of the desk and caught, “Could you find a more efficient method to waste my time? While you are stuffing your face with doughnut holes and perusing the internet you could be handing me the report I needed to return to LOCCENT  _three hours_ ago.

“Three hours ago? Oh sh- What time is it?...Shit! Oh shit.”

“Yes. Three hours ago.” His lips are a rise of sarcasm: no hint of teeth behind the pursing of his mouth, “Fifteen hundred hours, Newton.”

“You could have told me!”

“How about at the one hour mark? The two hour mark.” His voice rises, “Or fifteen minutes ago when I had Mr.Choi  page your comm, email both your personal and professional emails,  _and_  call your personal line.”

“Sorry. “ He rubs his temples and is reaching for his empty coffee cup.  “Ah. _Really_ sorry.”

“Are you?” Mouth twisted, his blood pressure follows the spike of his voice, “I find it hard to believe when somehow,  _somehow,_  you engage enough foresight to pick up a pencil and fight for your Oscar nomination when you are whipping yourself into a near masturbatory fervor over your beloved kaiju on that- that” He over enunciates to the point of spit, “ _pop. culture. landfill!”_

For a moment he feels he is outside his body, seeing his own face redden and spit with the fevered haze of rage kindled by stressful tinder. His is a panic, he is caught in a cloud of frenzied static and taken over by raw emotion of which he had never the courage nor the need to bridle. Dislodged from himself he sees many hued fragments of his immediate past. Last night when Vanessa covered the light from the bathroom door when her silhouette vibrated brimful with the hollow sounds of sorrow. He leads her to bed to shake, to lie, to weaken an increasingly fragile emotional foundation. She is irreparably wounded by the spotting in her underwear, by the drip droplets of blood fed through the pipes from the gaping mouth of the infirmary toilet. It is her third miscarriage within the year.  

His brow pinches, “Herm- Dr.Gottlieb.” No toes would be tread upon in this exchange laced with alien animosity. It is different than usual. Hermann’s mouth was the most threatening weapon on his body, but Newt couldn’t shake the inexorable notion Hermann’s hands had learned hostility. He could taste it. “Wait wait.” Half written, a document sweeps to his ankles and he stands. “Ten minutes. Give me ten minutes and I swear. Swear it’ll be on your desk .Hot and ready.” He laughs uneasily, “No joke, my man-“

As the executioner's ax his cane rose and fell; his skull cracked like a melon in the heat of summer and, from the deep and red fracture, spilled the slick sticky juice of cranial fruit. Newt’s knowledge spattered red into the ether of a useless and blackened eternity. Loud. Hoarse. Cut from him was a ragged stilted scream. Over legs that have been severed from command, Newt stumbled with the grace of a headless chicken, scrambling backward with one hand pressed to the wet gash of his skull and his glitching brain. Stiff and seized with alarm his abdomen hit against a dissection table. He witnesses the fall of a rockstar.

Newt’s arm jerked with his last human act of retaliation and, from Hermann’s reading glasses, created a sharp and blood flecked constellation of glass; shattered under his limp forearm in a plasticine grit and pop of the frame. Spittle slicked, moving to perform ghostly oratory, his mouth moved once, twice, then relaxed around the syllables of a silent quip. With the urgent stillness of smashed insects, of mutilated deer crucified by unwitting motorists over hoods of bloody cars, his body lay still; his veins had become stagnant rivers: the contents owned by gravity.

Adrenaline hit his guilty blood and he shook, hummed and howled like a swarm of haunted flies; body abuzz with the labor of grief Hermann Gottlieb falls to his knees.

The lab is an inhuman drone, metallic and dull; no comfort in feeling as if the last man on earth surrounded by  the heavy sounds of loneliness. The sound of a computer fan. The last paper fell to the floor from Newt’s desk, landing in a gored runway.  Acidic and human a noise comes from Hermann retching carrot sticks, tearing the sound of spew in hoarse convulsions from deep within his abdomen.  Wet strings of food stick to his lips and he, heavy of head and heart lifts his head and looks again to see Newt's corpse splayed in the disorganized angles of death.

“Dear God help me. God... help me what have I done. He’s –" A hand over his mouth he muffled the second pained utterance of realization, "...he’s dead.” He gripped his hair gone damp and shivered in an echo of his partner’s shuddering and shedding of his lively mantle. A carrot fleck stuck to his chin. "...Newton." Action triumphing over thought is Newt’s parting gift. Cycloptic, glossy as if wet in a tear, the clock on the wall watched and timed Hermann's reflexes at five minutes thirteen seconds spent in shock. Ticking, death recedes into the black waving arms of the hour hand, the minute hand, into the past, and ushers in the looming spectre of consequence.

_"Newton..."_

Time sucks from him the marrow of his bones and settles as lead into his framework.  

 


	2. On his rotten putrescine, on sweet cadaverine

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> “Not a corpse. This is Newton.” A voice says. He is not the stuff of biological landfill, he is not an object taking up physical space, he is Newton Geiszler: scientist, friend; even in his head his voice chokes ”rockstar...”
> 
> [In which Hermann hides the body and seeks Hannibal Chau]

He dwells on the same terror felt on viewing the smoking wake of a fire decimated art museum: work and time gone in a rage with the remains left to earth and air. Death has made an object of Newton; he is Death’s ephemeral bauble, made inanimate by the betrayal of his soul which flew through his gaping mouth which formed ultima through the final shudders of mortality.  Newton  is reduced to the equal of an empty computer chair, to his cold workspace, to his favorite pen laked over by Hermann’s bile.

And there it is the museum gone up in smoke, the canvas, Newt’s skin, is tasted by the tongues of flame, sensed by time, by flies waving hungry fat and lazy deep in the dark metal hollows of the Shatterdome and Newt’s arm sticks out like the wick. Every stab of the needle, he thinks, every beautiful piece of art buried into his being has been wasted. His exuberance, the tattooed manifestation of his joy in life will be churned and shit out by worms and animals as a manifesto to life’s impermanence. This too shall end. Newton saw the point in it and covered his body in hedonistic celebration, the hues of vigor paling by the hour, the tent poles of lively blood kicked in by his cane.

As the breath leaves his body in one strained held wheeze he feels he too is being lowered into the earth separated only by time and the proverbial six feet. Hermann’s bony hands shake into inadequacy, wet with his own vomit in the pale Vs of his digits. He doubles over. Wretches again, wiping the glisten of his palm on his pants, his mouth raw with stomach acid that leaves in an acrid smell as an invisible haze from his trembling lips.

He says his name again. Again. Again. _Newton._ When he reaches for his cane he finds the gold handle smeared over in blood, stuck over with protruding hairs left from Newton’s dandruffed scalp. Finding no power in his ceasing Hermann, weak, smudges the biology from the handle and, uneasy in his balance, lifts himself upward. Legs have the balance of a new deer shaking from the womb of its mother, the symmetry of life wasted on a damned man with tears forming in the pink creases of his eyelids.

Wheels to a flatbed cart creak an ominous dirge as they glide over the incongruous surface of the lab floor, catching where the cement was laid and then expanded upon in further construction of lab space. The veins on his hands, on his temple, his quivering jugular,  stick out as if his blood, unaffiliated with the crime, but with a criminal past, presses futile upon his skin to escape persecution.

The world is the only thing breathing around him, he himself forgoing breath in favor of laborious guilt. Chest tightening, his hands grip tighter the metal as he wheels the cart through bile and blood to rest at the head of the corpse- “ _Not a corpse_. This is Newton.” A voice says. He is not the stuff of biological landfill, he is not an object taking up physical space, he is Newton Geiszler: scientist, friend; even in his head his voice chokes... _”rockstar...”_

Hermann hooks his hands beneath Newt’s armpits still damp with sweat. Warm as life with the weight of death, his fingers seize with the want to recoil to his side, to the handwashing station, to dip into half an hour ago and retreat to work at his desk, but time has stretched into eternal minutes, hardening into permanency and Hermann has stamped out the heart beat in the crook of his armpits. He had not expected death to mock him with the echoes of dead heat radiating from the scientist’s skin. Desperate kicks to the wires of faithful machines like the needful fingers of children: dragging, clinging to the heavy current of Newt’s funerary body on its sterile ekklykema, rolling, rolling.

Hungry and cold a supply closet waits on the far end of the lab to be filled, the door a beckoning crack to asylum wide and white as a strip tease from heaven. Plastic jugs of ammonia, bleach, mops, gloves, masks, are organized in towers lit overhead by a perpetual afternoon of stale fluorescent lighting; washing all into shocking sterility. Unholy labor, Newt is spread upon the unswept floor to the workbench of small buzzing vultures.

He locks the door on a reality; another opens and in swarms the ghosts of guilt, denying him the peace of palpitating ignorance which has manifested in wet putrescence. Newt is a smell that follows him with an erotic familiarity; gathering as a sail-force in his lungs at its faintest pulse, invigorating capillaries, the swell of blood, tickling the hair in his nose, tasted as a vague sensory apparition in the grooves of his chalk-dry tongue and fueling the furious heartbeat of Hermann’s sixth nervous orgasm received in his pale aching hand. Vanessa shifts next to him in bed. He shudders, he sweats and then rolls over haunted.

Newt’s presence fills the lab, penetrates dark nooks and whets the palettes of crannies with his distended bloat; he commands the attention of a room with a power not lent to him in life. Here he was in his most basal form, in his most pure, uninhibited by personality quirks, by gross habits, and off putting exuberance that led only to misunderstanding. On Newt’s rotten putrescine, on sweet cadaverine, slumped to the floor between mop bucket and hanging noosed brooms, his nose burns on the nervous inhale. Cellphone in his hand he speaks through the animal hiss and spit of a bad connection.  “Hannibal- “ A fly lands on the stems of Newt’s lashes. _“Mr.Chau..._ Newton. I- I – I... _”_ The confession will not climb out the slimy heat of his choking throat. “Eloquent. Real goddamn _eloquent_. Cut to the nuts of the matter, Calculus. I’m due for a –“  

“He’s dead.”

“Dead...? Huh. On a scale of doorknob to disco, how dead is the brat.”

”I...” On Hannibal’s amusement he feels sick and lowers his voice to the depth of a grave, “I killed him...”The black silence smiles gold then hums low- the fly alights- and Hannibal Chau laughs fissures across the line like black snakes.

“Jesus kid...” Hannibal holds a handkerchief to his nose, his figure in the white light carves space for his mass colored in bloody silk, “Some business trip.”

“What do I do? W-What do I do?” A present emptiness subsumes the waves of newly familiar nausea in his stomach.

“Calm the hell down.” His shadow shrouds Newton’s inanimacy, menacing hand thick with rings trades handkerchief for a mop turned handle down,  “Jeez...How long?”

Prodding at Newt’s chest, at his arm which he lifts and then lets fall wet to the floor, “Four days?”

“Five...” His heart made a home in his windpipe. Newt’s mottled face, mouth pressed open as a fleshy crevice by the veined swell of his tongue, tastes a silence afforded by the liquefying of his throat.

 “Should’ve called me sooner. Could’ve gotten him in a few coolers. Sold him to the highest bidding pervert. Geiszler by the pound. Some sick fuck would love to get a handfulla that kid’s _dead_ ass-”

“Stop it!”

“The hell you want me to do, Doc.” The mop is shoved butt end into Hermann’s face, “You’re facing implications here you don’t got the balls to face. Now do you want me to help you bury him nice and shallow or do you want to _think_ about it n’ hope you don’t got a nosy janitorial staff with a taste for justice.”

Resigned. Hermann nods, breathes in Newt through his nose, through his mouth open on a tight aching jaw.

“See you tonight.”

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> I didn't have a beta here, so any mistakes are entirely up to my own impatience. Next chapter should be the last and the nastiest. ; ) Hope you enjoyed chapter two!


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